Dedupe and Oracle RMAN Backups – it’s all about ROI

My last post walked through the details behind a 6 week Permabit Labs study of dedupe effectiveness with Oracle RMAN backups. To summarize, within a single week, using a standard regimen of full and incremental backups, we saw 10x data reduction rates – and that was with completely random generated data. When we extended out to 7 weeks of full backups we saw 16:1! What’s more, we were able to chart the increase in efficiency over time and demonstrate that it scales to much larger volumes. Put another way, our research proved that over a 7 week RMAN backup cycle, dedupe will effectively reduce 4 PBs of data to 250 TBs!

Even if I could manage to purchase an integrated 4 PB storage system today, at an industry average cost of $5/GB for enterprise storage I’d have to spend $20M USD just to acquire the hardware and I’d easily spend 4 times that once I’ve factored in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) aka power, cooling, floor space, maintenance and cost of administration for a total cost of $80M USD!

With dedupe, I can deliver the same data storage capability with 250 TBs of storage consumed – projected hardware cost, $1.25M USD and with TCO $5M USD. It’s certainly easy to see why dedupe is so popular for backup applications, that adds up to savings of $15M and that’s with uncompressible data!

These are great ROI numbers for any dataset. With database backups there has been a misunderstanding that they required specialized content scanning to deduplicate well. While Permabit has content scanning capabilities, our testing demonstrates that the general savings from popular block-based deduplication solutions (such as those typically found on primary storage systems) is significant for database backup environments.

Speaking of compression, did I mention Permabit just announced our new Albireo COMPRESS product? Next post we’ll talk about some of the results of our studies on the effectiveness of compression on databases.

As Vice President of Product at Permabit, Louis Imershein is responsible for product management and strategic planning. He has 25 years of technical leadership experience in product management, software development and technical support.
Prior to Permabit, Imershein was a Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Sun Microsystems Data Management Group. Before joining Sun, he was at SCO where his titles included Product Manager, Software Architect and Senior Technical Lead.
Imershein has a Bachelor’s degree in Biological Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz and has earned certificates in software design, device driver development, system administration, and software testing.